[Best Friends Forever] Celebrating dramaland’s odd friendships

by Guest Beanie

Jealousy Incarnate

By @gadis

A childhood friend, a best friend you once met at some school club, or a coworker-turned-closest-confidant. Those might be the kinds of friendships we can easily relate to because they’re something we have experienced, one way or another. But don’t we also have that odd friendship? The one that makes people go, “Huh?” listening to how you two first met and became friends. An ex-love-rival who bonded with you through a shared jealousy and pain, perhaps. Or maybe the president of your anti-fan club that turned into your best friend. This essay will be about them—characters who have built unusual friendships with the most unexpected people in their lives.

The first one that came to mind was Jugglers’ Nam Chi-won and Vice President Do. In the middle of so many annoying, frustratingly oppressive, and intentionally hurtful in-laws, their little relationship brought such a delight to my watching experience. How brilliant was it to have the man who ultimately understood our prickly and emotionally distant hero be his ex-father-in-law?

Jugglers

I love how Vice President Do could needle him about his unbending way toward people in his work life without Chi-won having to immediately change his ways. The older man might be his immediate boss, but the familial ties that once bound them together gave a layer of closeness that allowed Chi-won to argue back or pass the criticism off as fatherly concern. At the same time, it also gave Vice President Do the power to dig to the root of Chi-won’s trust issues and urge him to start trusting his new secretary. It’s interesting how the divorce in Chi-won’s life gave them an extra line where they could stand as boss-employee with a much diminished formality and also as some sort of family, though with the added distance needed to view everything more objectively.

Smart Prison Living brought another memorable and unexpected friendship in the form of Beobja and Jun-ho. We first met Jun-ho as the strict, law-abiding prison guard who distanced himself from both the other guards and the inmates. He would be the first person to tell our hero, Je-hyuk, not to be too good to his cellmates because they were all bad people who had committed crimes. Everything in prison was black and white with him and who would be more perfect to change his mind than Beobja, the young man who was in and out of prison like it was his own home, completely unruffled by Jun-ho’s dismissive attitude, with an optimistic streak a mile wide?

Smart Prison Living

They are two fundamentally different people with different moral codes who come from vastly different life circumstances. Their friendship started with tons of baby steps, helped with a good dose of shared adoration and care for Je-hyuk and his baseball career. Maybe that’s why it was extra satisfying to watch Jun-ho starting to greet Beobja back, to see the two cups of coffee he always brought to the training facility turned into three, to realize that he finally let the younger man call him hyung instead of the usual Officer Lee, and finally to watch these two casually discussing the troublesome inmates from Jun-ho’s wing. I love how this relationship taught Jun-ho that you do need to know when to bend the rules a bit, and how sometimes kindness can be more impactful to some inmates. On the other hand, it also taught Beobja that there is actually a second chance at life and that he can always choose to be the better person than he gave himself credit for.

This next friendship is my personal favorite. While dramaland is still so stingy with good female friendships, Jealousy Incarnate brought me the epic frenemy-turned-awesome-momance in Ja-young and Sung-sook. These two capable and intelligent career women started off as legendary rivals both at work and in their personal lives. They hilariously have similar taste in everything. Of course they married the same man and then later divorced him because they were too busy with their work. They once again got involved in each other’s lives when their ex-husband passed away and they fought for their daughter’s custody, and then somehow found themselves falling for the same chef landlord.

Jealousy Incarnate

I reckoned that everything would go down in the usual clichéd direction, but nope. These two moms were forced to call a truce the moment they both sneaked into their daughter’s house in order to try winning her affection back. Hijinks ensued when they had to live together and share a room and even back each other up in many situations involving their ex-in-laws. Who would have thought that a relationship this fraught with rivalry could end up with these two women living together with their daughter, forming an unusual family they all craved for? Or that they would come out from this impossible situation having found a new best friend they never knew they needed?

Marriage Not Dating

Last but not least is Jang-mi and Hoon-dong, the ex-lovers from Marriage Not Dating who found themselves becoming each other’s voice of reason. After such a messy and pitiful breakup that led to a stalking accusation in court, I never thought they would get involved with each other ever again. But I guess dating each other’s best friend afterwards would do that to you. Between being a failed cupid and the whole don’t-you-dare-hurt-him/her routine, these two found a new comfortable dynamic that allowed them to wail hysterically in each other’s arms or shake some sense into the other’s heads. Sometimes, an ex-lover who has seen every embarrassing thing about you and knows your first-world problems inside-out does make for a pretty good friend.

What really caught my interest about these friendships is the simple acknowledgment that humans are unique and have no set reaction in any given situation. I love how these little stories reminded me that we can, indeed, find friendship in the most unexpected place, at the most unexpected time, and with the most unexpected people. And really, if these two kids who were at each other’s throats the moment they became deskmates could survive the next thirty years as the most unlikely best friends ever, maybe there is no truly odd friendship out there. Just people who understand each other best despite their unusual history.

Smart Prison Living

 
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